Rush
by Valxyri
Summary: Sherlock whump because I said so! warnings: drugs, swearing
1. Chapter 1

**Did a quick rewrite, nothing drastic.**

**I'm so exited that people are actually following this! **

**chapter 3 up soon!**

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It had been three hours since Sherlock had vanished, the pass code to Jeremiah Balusi's laptop locked away in his mind. He had been waiting until the computer was retrieved, waiting to impress everyone as he opened it with five precise keystrokes and used the photographs on the hard drive to link Sanders back to the human trafficking operation which (he was planning to remind everyone) had thrived so verdantly under Lestrade's jurisdiction. He was already choreographing his great reveal on the way from the tube station to Scotland Yard when the chemical in his coffee made it impossible to resist the clinging hands suddenly pulling him into the back of a nondescript blue minivan.

His body is some faraway island founded on whimsical irrational faith.

Through the fog he hears questions, he hears his own voice but it's sleepy, garbled under the horrible weight of drugs.

Flashing lights bring him a moment of hope, his eyes cast upwards through the haze, people are running, there are shouts about cops, and inventory. Then someone strikes him, there's a cruel jab at his shoulder.

The source of the pain doesn't register for a moment, and then it hits him.

Sherlock inhales deeply through his nose, only fighting for a moment to cling onto his sanity before his head rolls back and a sudden rush of delirious joy blossoms in crinkling laugh lines around his eyes. Chemical euphoria gushes across his brain, sparking through his skin like an orgasm.

...breathe...

His heartbeat rocks him gently, and succumbing entirely to the deadly liquid ecstasy in his blood he lets his head drop to his chest. He's just so tired…

"Shit!" the word hangs sluggishly, meaningless in the vacuum of Sherlock's mind. He can feel the weight of his brain in his skull, rolling like a bowling ball between his ears.

"Sherlock?"

J-o-h-n his cortex supplies over a few seconds which seem to me melting into days.

"Sherlock!"

His head falls against something warm and fruity smelling, J… what comes next?

"Cummon, look at me." Sherlock's eyes open half way and focus somewhere far beyond John's face, pinprick pupils shine in steely grey pools.

Sherlock winces at the sudden terrible pressure of fingers lifting his head. But oh! The movement causes the room to spin, as if he's attached, tied down to that horrible rubbing weight in his skull. It's a cannon ball, a boulder, a black hole grinding itself to dust in its own gravity. He's atlas, with the world on his shoulders, Prometheus, chained to the accursed rock.

His hands are tied behind him, he has no idea if it's been days or mere hours.

With a gasping shutter and no bodily control to aim anywhere but down he vomits into John's sweater.

"I'm shrry," he mumbles and blacks out for a second.

"It's alright, you're fine, just breathe Sherlock."

There are fingers at his throat and they burn like needles pushing into his skin. Breathe, he chokes, he can smell blood.

"Cut his wrists free!" someone orders and a moment later Sherlock feels his body being guided by confident hands to fall limp into a sea of wool and a chemical compound which he cannot identify as artificial strawberry fragrance.

John's confident hands are on his shoulders, guiding his fall as his feet skid uselessly underneath him.

His head touches the floor and his eyes roll back.

"No, no, no!" a frantic order from somewhere long ago and abstract. "Keep your eyes open, say something." His body's burning, every vein is lined in grey ash, and he can feel the crisp regularity of his heartbeat slurring.

"Sherlock? Speak to me."

Sherlock considers vaguely why John doesn't reflect so much light from this place between the atoms in his own body. It's dark. He so wants a rest, for the first time in his life he wants to take the slow route. Sleep for a bit in the place where his brain had once been.

"I need to know what they gave you." John's voice is serious, and a little bit afraid.

"Whathey – gave –m?" is all he can manage to articulate, his tongue feels like a strip of beef jerky down his throat.

"Sanders injected you with something," John's voice is earnest, this is important.

He's done this before, where has he felt this before? Back when the drugs felt _good_.

_Barbiturates_ his mind grinds against the inside of his skull, _heroin._ He wonders if it's too many syllables for him to manage. He can see his own hands on the cement floor, strange foreign objects, the mechanics of which he cannot fathom.

John's face is close to his, he's repeating the question but the words don't make any sense.

Sherlock swallows in an attempt to speak; he pushes the words through parched lips.

"Sodium thiopental," he somehow articulates, the chemical formula more easily accessed than anything colloquial, "f-f-r thinteerigation," breathe, breathe, speak, "diacetylmorphine." He pronounces flawlessly, "m-little reward - " Sherlock feels himself laughing, but he's struggling to breathe the constriction in his diaphragm makes him heave violently, a hand rubs across his shoulders as they tremble with muscle spasms. John's moving him, elevating his head, Sherlock can smell furaneol, "too-much?"

"Just a bit, yeah." The room washes around him in dull, sludgy hues, Lestrade stands, bug eyed on watery knees and feet which refuse to stay fixed against the ground. He's barking something over a radio, his voice sounds like Beethoven. The dark ceiling is melting into shiny black sludge. Everything is inexplicably pink.

"Sherlock do you know what day it is?"

Days? What were days but the earth turning round the sun, trivial.

"Answer the question, don't let yourself pass out." That would be bad.

"-day," he mutters.

"Tell me our address, where do we live?" he feels John wiping blood from his nose.

Through a crack in his eyelashes Sherlock can see the twisting, rolling textures of John's jumper, he can smell vomit and the lingering scent of sheep in the fabric. He wants nothing more than to _sleep_. Wouldn't be that bad. The fibers in his field of vision are writhing, sliding in amongst one another, and then suddenly they are white snakes, with their powerful bodies coiled around his friend. Sherlock makes to move away from the hallucination but finds his body unresponsive, his legs spasm of their own accord dragging his boot heels on cold cement.

"Shh sh, two…" John is prompting.

"John?" His voice comes out scratchy and weak and he doesn't recognize it.

"It's okay, there's an ambulance coming."

"I'm halucnnt-t-tiinng." This morning he had been confident and brilliant, he had been in recovery, he had been happy. Sherlock shuts his eyes to find that his mind palace is burning. There's nowhere to run from the fire and the darkness and the horrible smoke which has filled his head, he can feel his brain falling apart around him. It occurs to him that the damage may be permanent. This morning… His breath has been repressed to an alarmingly shallow gasp. Kind fingers drag through his hair, drenched with sweat.

"You're going to be okay." John says because it's what he's meant to say. But Sherlock's eyes are rolling back into his head, eyelids a flutter.

"Hey!" he shouts, shaking his friend's face forcefully, "don't fall asleep."

But there's no response, Sherlock tries meekly to draw breath around a mouthful of rising bile.

He is vaguely aware of the salty intrusion of fingers in his mouth. Of John's voice, impersonal, business like. The army doctor cradles his friend's frighteningly unresponsive body. Sherlock's muscles are stiff and trembling and there's no light in his pinpoint eyes.

What had once been a haze has turned into a shadow, a deadly, vacant weight; he can feel his body shutting down. Flames tear at the high architecture of his mind, beams are crashing down around him in showers of crimson sparks, the smoke makes his eyes water and his lungs burn. But there was so much left to do?

Darkness swallows him finally; he's tired of fighting, so tired.

John crouches over his unconscious friend, with a sudden professional alacrity as he rolls Sherlock onto his back and begins chest compressions. His lips are white and pressed thin, he doesn't even look up as Lestrade kneels down beside him to begin rescue breathing.

twenty nine-twenty eight-twenty seven

once, in Afghanistan, he had kept a boy alive for thirty minutes with nothing but his hands and his lungs.

It takes ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive. To john Watson it feels like an eternity.

six-seven-eight

When the paramedics appear outside the hangar where Sanders had been keeping the Consulting Detective the blessed clatter of a gurney attracts Lestrade's gaze. Red and blue lights slide across the high ceiling, cut to ribbons by the leaded windows.

ten-nine-eight

The sanguine petrichor of body fluids in sand. John holds a weak pulse at the tips of his fingers, he wipes his friend's blood from his mouth with a cringe.

"Over here!" the detective inspector yells, the three of them are bathed on the shifting tricolor florescence of the emergency lights. John doesn't break his rhythm as he watches the medics descend on Sherlock's body like hungry vultures picking at a piece of carrion. Sherlock's hand is curled into the curve of his hip uselessly.

_seventeen-eighteen-ninteen_

Someone's rattling off medical history and a repeating Sherlock's deduction concerning which combination of chemicals had ben pumped into is body, john realizes that it's his voice. He never wants to feel the texture of the words, _intravenously administered opiate toxicity _in his mouth again. one of the medicspushes him back with a syringe full of what he suposes is naloxene. He watches, arms folded and mouth straight as Sherlock is intubated, his dark shirt is pulled open for sensors to be pasted unceremoniously to his chest. The tube in his mouth slurs his features imperceptibly, but enough to remind john of a corpse.

A fresh corpse, not yet picked at or coarsened with the desert wind, or rolled in a prayer rug and buried with gravel and only their mutilated helmet as a grave marker. Formed from a life beneath his confident hands, the only things reaching to snatch him from his fate. He never worried about weather they were strong enough. He couldn't risk hesitating, because sometimes they weren't.

"John?" he jerks back to reality at the touch of the detective inspector's hand.

Did Lestrade hear that machine gun fire?

The doors of the ambulance are flung wide to that brilliant white interior. Someone's holding up an IV bag, while another of the paramedics bends low to check pupil reactivity. Hands reach out to close the doors and with a crunch of tires over gravel the bus speeds away.

"Theyre taking him to Montmercy."

John looks up through his head for a brief second before blinking.

"Let's go." He folds his arms and jerks his head, watching the lights of the ambulance with a mixture of envy and fear.

"Get in." Lestrade orders, opening the passenger door to his cruiser. John silently obeys, feeling oddly empty, adrift, terrified. He hears the siren click on and they follow the ambulance out to the main road.

Sirens are public screams. As Lestrade steers skillfully through the respectfully parted traffic it begins to rain. John feels itchy and terrified and unspeakably lonely as he leans back and watches the little rivulets on the window bend the flashing light towards him. Tires hiss on wet pavement and all John can do is breathe.

_Please, God, let him live._


	2. Chapter 2

Greg Lestrade was going to enjoy every second of this cigarette. The texture of the filter at the tip of his tongue was thrilling to some childish part of his mind. The way the bitter smoke caught in his throat leaving behind the subtle addictive rush of nicotine. The pulsing glow of the ember as he pulled oxygen into it comforted him and he felt his tension dissipate as he breathed out smoke to join the low hanging London clouds. The grey light of a spring morning spread soft sheets of cotton across the sky, the sun had yet to rise.

He looked at his phone, Sherlock's impatient text about the Balusi warrant still glowed in the screen from the previous morning. It was six fifteen AM.

"Americano?" John Watson said suddenly from too close by. He handled stress with a practiced hand, which Greg envied. He put out his cigarette to spare the doctor's nerves and shifted the heavy bag he carried on one hip.

"Thank you." Greg took his coffee as well as half a pecan bear claw from a paper bag.

"It's a nice little café that." John observed, leaning against the railing beside the detective inspector, sipping at his coffee with raised eyebrows.

"Certainly open early enough." Lestrade said around a mouthful of bearclaw, and for one fleeting moment he enjoyed this mundane sort of conversation, there was no one to be rude or insolent, no one blindly went on talking after the normal social limitation on such things passed. No one to call him thick, or dull or go sweeping off midsentence.

They sat in silence for a few long minutes. Well manicured boxwood hedges rustling behind them in the steady humid wind. The hospital loomed above them; the old building was crumbling, once sharp stone gargoyles have their edges dulled by acid rain and time.

"You could have gone in the ambulance," Greg offers delicately.

John's eyes close for a moment, a look of something like shame crosses his features. "I couldn't…" his eyes are fixed far away. _Have another friend die in my arms_, His brain supplies. "They know what they're doing." For a moment he's back in Afghanistan, it's not all barren, unforgiving rocks and sun, there are white and purple poppies nodding in the breeze, the streets of Kandahar had been painted in tones of lavender and gold in the early mornings.

"Is this the first time?" John asks, suddenly bold to his friend's elusive past.

Greg's eyebrows lift without his eyes moving from the horizon, the London skyline sparkles with the first gold light of morning. "That I know of."

"But?"

"The drug's bust?" Lestrade smiles knowingly.

"He mentioned being _in recovery_." John mumbles into his coffee. It's delicious.

"He was- is!" he corrects, "as far as we know."

"I _think_ I'd know." John scoffed.

"No, you wouldn't." Lestrade stated as a matter of fact.

"What do you mean?"

The detective inspector let out a sound that might have been a strangled chuckle, "what do you think he was doing? Passing out in back allies? Selling his body for a fix? Using dirty needles?"

"I…" John frowned in thought.

"Sherlock Holmes was the most high functioning coke head I've ever met; he could have been a diabetic for all we knew." Lestrade winced, somehow this made it worse, "it took me years to find out he had a problem, and I still have no idea how long it was before that."

"So it can't have been that bad?" John offered hopefully.

"Twenty grand a month from the Holmes family coffer."

"Jesus." John winced choking on creamy foam, "how did you find out?"

"I'm a cop, I spent of few years in narcotics before moving into homicide, and we did a raid on a warehouse in Acton, brought in a few subjects. They can shorten their jail time if they give us names and…"

"One of those names was Sherlock Holmes." John deduced with a sigh.

"Actually it was his flat mate, big time dealer. But Sherlock, we hadn't had much to do with each other before then, you know how he behaves towards the police, but I'd had a few opportunities to watch him work and it was…"

"fantastic." John offered.

"Un-bloody-believable." Lestrade took a sip from his coffee, "his house got raided, there was an inquiry, one thing lead to another and eventually it was the drugs or the work. It was only later that I realized that the only reason no one suspected anything was that we'd never seen him sober."

"Wow." John felt as if a crushing weight had just been dropped on him, he pushed his coffee into his chest and stood up with a sigh.

"The worst part was watching that veneer of arrogance; genius and cocaine start to crack. He makes himself out to be more than other men, in some ways he's right but chemicals are chemicals."

"So you?"

"Sat on the edge of the bathtub while he puked his guts out for a week, put up with the lies, the violence, the crocodile tears. Got blood, urine and follicle tests done every time he worked with us, and as a weird, Holmes way of saying thank you his brother got me transferred to homicide."

"That's very thoughtful." John half smiled.

"The worst part is, I don't think he ever stopped, not entirely, it's not a habit, I don't think, maybe a few times a year when he gets bored, certainly a better outlet for his mania than illegal firearms. But, he's a chemist with a degree in criminology and an IQ over a hundred and sixty. He's the best damn liar in England, if he wants cocaine, he'll get away with it."

Lestrade's words were a warning and the two men let them hover in the air between them for a long moment. Cars moved in regular stops and starts around the roundabout in front of the hospital. John breathed in the cool morning air finally gaining the courage to break the awful silence.

"I'll look out for him, Greg." John looked down to where he had scrubbed Sherlock's vomit away from his shirt in the bathroom sink.

"See that you do," Lestrade smirked, "I need him. And," he announced with a deep breath, "I need to be at work in an hour."

"Lucky you."

"I almost forgot," Lestrade relieved himself of the heavy shoulder bag, handing it to John. "Donovan dropped it off."

"What's this then?"

"It's for Sherlock, when he wakes up, might take his mind off things. No one at the yard can seem to crack the incription."

"I guess you'll have to call a consultant." John mused, peeking in the bag to discover what was clearly Jerimiah Belusi's laptop.

"That's signed out of evidence for twenty four hours, be sure he wakes up in time to take a good look at it."

"Will do."


	3. Chapter 3

**I wrote a prequel to this! it's the last chapter!**

**I love reviews so don't hold back!**

**thanks for reading!**

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Sherlock woke up briefly to the gleaming slide of florescent light across his eyes and the soft brush of medically purified oxygen over his face. It's cold and loud and he's naked.

There are words but they move to quickly for his brain to interpret. A large breasted nurse leans over him and he's too weak to struggle away from the efficient nitrite hands doing something unpleasant and invasive between his thighs.

He allows his eyes to flitter open a crack and is dimly aware of four or five onlookers. Mid twenties, wearing matching scrubs and bored expressions.

_Oh god it's a teaching hospital._

The nurse addresses him as_ Mister Holmes_ (no, that's Mycroft) and jabs a needle into the IV port in his arm. He tries to glare at her, to somehow avenge this ignominy, but receives only a chastising pat on the cheek. He jerks away from her hand as if it burns him.

"Were gonna get you cleaned up, honey!" She smiles; she's black, and American. She's wearing scrubs with bears on them. Sherlock squeezes his eyes shut and wills himself far, far away.

That wholesome darkness closes him again inside his head, its nice here, quiet.

* * *

John stared at the laptop screen in silent thought. The fan whirred with a soft vibration against his knees.

_Login -_ it says and presents him with a blinking cursor in a rounded white box.

John Watson was not a genius. He had run through the names of all the girls brought in, through friends, family, through the authors on the bookshelf in Jeremiah's apartment, identification numbers, girlfriends and pets.

Nothing.

The cursor blinks patiently, somewhere a clock ticks. The heart monitor pulses silently in the dark of the late night ICU.

He looks across at his friend, eyes habitually scanning the EKG machine. Lestrade had ordered the hospital staff to allow him to stay, had said that John was waiting to take a statement the moment Sherlock woke up, which was true. That had been a day ago.

"We're running out of time, Sherlock." John said with a sigh, touching his friend's wrist affectionately. With Jeremiah Balusi dead, the only hope for convicting all of those involved with what they now new to call Featherweight Global Shipping Co. was locked away in the Consulting detective's unconscious brain.

_HA!_ Sherlock had jumped up in triumph from his throne of deep introspection on the couch. The vast collection of evidence was pinned up, scribbled over and arranged just so across the living room floor. He went on for some time about incription methods and something else, something that didn't seem to fit in anywhere: _Pigeon, John, a pigeon!_

And that was the last he had heard from him. He hadn't followed him to Scotland yard, it was John's night on call that morning and he had not slept in twenty four hours, Sherlock could wait, one time, he told himself, one time without his blogger wouldn't kill him.

John smirked at the still figure in the bed beside him. Wasn't it all so poetic?

Of course "pigeon" had been the first thing he had tried. Every variation of spelling and every number which could be replaced with a letter, the Latin word for pigeon, ("Columba," Google informed him.) the names of famous pigeons, various other doves, expanding to fowl and then just birds.

Nothing.

He stared at his own laptop, open and glowing on the food tray which folded out from the side of the hospital bed, it offered no inspiration.

s-h-e-r

John typed, hoping vaguely that all criminal minds worked like Irene's. Once again, the now too familiar red X of failure flashed on the screen and the cursor reappeared.

Blink…blink…blink

Slapping shut the offending machine he set it on the bedside cabinet and stood to stretch his legs. The curtain jingled as he went through it. Standing by a window he watched the city move around him, red tail lights dancing in a steady pattern across the broad landscape. He folded his arms, militantly stubborn, hopelessly patient.

"Are you with him?" the, American nurse in the bear print scrubs appeared at John's shoulder.

"Yes." John said without tearing his eyes from the distant gleaming skyline.

"Has the doctor spoken to you about his followup?"

"What?" John scowled down at her, "no, he's…"

"I though not, they just don't have the time for these cases." She clicked her tongue and John frowned at her opening his mouth in silent offence.

"I'm…" he pushed the papers she offered away, "I'm a doctor," her eyebrows popped upwards. "I'll look after hi…" the blare of the heart monitor sent a spike of adrenaline through John's chest, him and the nurse both leapt to push aside the curtains.

Sitting up on the bed was a very pained looking Sherlock, staring at the disconnected electrode which was no longer registering a heartbeat because it was in his fingers. Sherlock studied the sticky little paper thing at the end of the wire with a furrowed brow.

The nurse was instantaneously by his side, fixing her ruined handiwork, unfolding weak fingers and cooing gently. Sherlock turned away from her as if her presence was somehow offensive to him. His face was lined with pain and his hair was wild where he had been sleeping on it.

John sighed and turned off the EKG alarm. Sherlock managed to dissuade the nurse's invasive hands by curling into the fetal position facing away from her. Tubes and wires tugged uncomfortably around his body. His head was screaming.

"I'll fetch doctor Colinson." She promised with a smile and closed the curtain behind her leaving them alone with the strange shadows cast by the curtain rods and the lights on the monitors.

"Hey mate." John smiled touching his friend's shoulder, the clean blue fabric of his hospital gown crinkled.

Sherlock didn't speak but patted John's hand noncommittally and curled his gangly limbs into a tighter ball under the coarse hospital sheets.

"How do you feel?" he sat down and put on his best doctor voice.

Sherlock blinked slowly at him with bruised, bloodshot eyes, a color lighter than john had ever seen them.

"Stripped."

"Yeah, just give yourself a few days to recover."

"I wonder if she knows that her husband's gay."

"Who?"

Sherlock gestured vaguely.

"The nurse?"

"She has a name John."

"Sorry."

"Anita displays both the competence and the alacrity which are the heart and soul of medical professionalism, I should probably tell her about her husband," he yawned hugely. blinking tired grey eyes at the dark wall of curtains.

"No, you shouldn't." John ordered.

"Whatever you say," his eyes slid shut.

"Hey," John ran one thumb along the too sharp ridge of his scapula.

Sherlock only looked at him, haggard and childish, his face was lined with wearisome channels, too much weight in his head.

John was loathe to wake him to an interrogation, to tempt him with work so soon. he could feel Sherlock trembling under his hand. his teeth chattered as he wet his lips.

"I'm bored already."

John smiled, Sherlock pulled his nostrils around the uncomfortable nasal cannula.

"we can head home in a few hours, just be patient."

"What time is it?" Sherlock mumbled.

"Around three."

"I've been out for a day? what the hell..." Sherlock covered his face in his hand, squeezing shut his eyes.

"How's your head?"

"Massive."

John smiled at his friend thoughtfully.

"Why are you here?" Sherlock asked as if some sudden detection had just crystallized in his mind. "It's well past visiting hours, I hope you didn't tell them you were my husband?"

"Lestrade needs the pass code, to Jeremiah Belusi's laptop…"

"Who's Jeremiah Balusi?"

John opened his mouth with an expression of concern. "You don't remember?"

"It's…" he covered his eyes with one hand, "it just says deleted." Sherlock mumbled.

"You can't have deleted it, you were up to your ears in this case." John speaks quietly, trying to hide the worry in his voice.

"It's gone, it's all… What happened John?"

"Eric Sanders was using his global shipping business to cover for the Taiwanese mafia's human trafficking ring operating in London, Jeremiah Belusi got his hands on some photographs which linked him back to The Palalin family and was murdered for his trouble, unfortunately the only copies of the photographs are on his heavily encrypted laptop which _you_ claimed to know the password to."

"But…"

"He drugged your Starbucks and grabbed you off the street, it took Mycroft's people three hours to find the van and in that time he shot you full of drugs and left you to asphyxiate on your own vomit."

Sherlock inhaled with a look of comprehension, "right," he pushed himself upright on shaky arms, "You have notes?"

John sat back in the uncomfortable arm chair, "computer."

Sherlock adjusted the angle of the bed with the press of a button and opened John's macbook. He blinked at the login screen, typed out the normal password, and was presented with a red X and a sound of dissatisfaction from the machine.

"You changed it?"

"Yes, yes I did." John's eyebrows went up marginally. Sherlock smirked. Typed something at the speed of lightning and was rewarded with a loading screen. He blinked over at john, feeling more himself.

"Do I even have to…"

"You can only remember four passwords, the old one, the one you use at the bank, loverboy spelled with zeros, and my personal favorite, your Reddit username."

Sherlock smirked humorlessly, opened the document labeled only with the date and the words "case notes" underneath, and buried himself in the scrolling text.

John lay back in the chair with his feet on the rung under the bed and closed his eyes.

"John?" Sherlock asked a moment later, his friend grunted in reply. "Are you sure you haven't omitted anything? Anything I might have mentioned, which you might not have understood at the time, you know how often it happens."

"mmm," the army doctor blinked sleepily, "Pigeon." He wet his lips in his penumbral stupor. "You kept going on about a pigeon."

Sherlock sneered down at him.

"Pigeon?" He ruminated closing his eyes and John's laptop with the same breath, when he again looked up it was with a wry, satisfied smile. The case was solved.

"Not a Pigeon, John a pidgin," he pronounced his vowels with all the clarity formal British boarding school could provide, "the message on Belusi's cell phone was in pidgin English," Sherlock grabbed the strange laptop, fighting off a wave of nausea as he twisted his stiff abdominal muscles. He brought the machine to his knees, opening it to glow blue over his wasted looking cheeks.

"It took me a few days to figure out exactly what regional dialect. Translate the most likely candidates… and…"

The cursor blinked at him patiently.

Sherlock's long fingers hovered over the keys for a minute, habit telling him to use gloves. But a millisecond later he recognized the oily smears all over the keys and closed his eyes in frustration at his idiotic flat mate.

He typed five characters.

/enter/

X

He tried twice more before he was rewarded with a soft blue graphic and an animated egg timer.

"Brilliant." John shook his head.

Sherlock smiled slowly, "you think so?"

"Absolutely brilliant." He heard John mutter into his sweater.

Sherlock texted Lestrade with John's phone. Put away the two computers and lay back. Systematically deleting every file containing the word cocaine.


	4. Chapter 4

Some time in 2008...

The pale light of a distant Elvin forest glowed across Sherlock's bare chest and shoulders, he looked emaciated, sick in the artificial glow of the computer monitor, frowning at the beast which lunged upwards all alight with sparking spells and flashing numbers indicating damage.

The computer was the second most valuable thing he owned, five terabytes of hard drive space, top of the line processor, blue LEDs, custom made cooling system. He had sold the old flat screen monitor for drug money and now he was left with an unwieldy grey box from nineteen ninety eight. He had made it himself, carefully researching every component, settling for only the best. He had made it as a work tool, a finely honed machine to be his perfect artificial assistant, the computer was a piece of art, and he had it running World of Warcraft.

Sherlock wore a head set in his long hair through which came voices like banshees from the far side of hell. The sound of them raked up and down his spine which even through the heavy opiate mist, felt like bees stinging his cerebral cortex.

-I'll fuckin' rape the whole Guild, y' ain't even doing it right!

That was StriKKK9 the guild leader slash suspect. His choice of hyperbole matched poetically well with his crime.

-Shut the fuck up, StriKKK9, are you just that fuckin stupid?

That was Akrylik, a forty something, morbidly obese videogame addict

-Akrylik you're such a fag, you're meant to heal me when I use that spell!

_Breathe Sherlock, you can do this._

-Bite me Nuggz666 is meant to be here, it's not my fault you can't tank.

There had only been one witness to his crime, an agoraphobic teenage boy named Nick Rasmin, an obsessive online gamer, and an officer in one of the most exclusive guilds in Azeroth. He had been connected on a video call at the time of the rape and murder of Shelia stein. He was the only person who could confirm the man who people "I-R-L" called Thomas Bedfordson also known as StriKKK9 as the killer.

But he had slit his wrists in a bathtub two days later, because apparently that's something that agoraphobic teenagers do.

But he had not told anyone of his suicidal tendencies especially not his guild mates, they still thought he was alive, which left a convenient hole in the officer's circle for anyone with a touch for hacking to take. Sherlock had no way of knowing weather StriKKK9 knew what the boy had seen, but eventually he would let something slip.

With his soul Nick Rasmin took whatever assurance there was of pinning the murder on the guilty party. Bedfordson had been very careful, he had, of course left enough evidence for Sherlock but not, it seemed for Scotland Yard, and so here he sat, waiting for the man to brag. He was under house arrest for the time being and seemed to have decided to spend it on a virtual risk/reward structure. Tongues got loose on the internet. The illusion of anonymity made stories twist into lies and conversation gush with hyperbole.

-I told you to hold back Akrylik, we can't agro the whole fucking dungeon!

These days he seemed to cycle languidly between narcotics and stimulants. An endless tropical cruise from south America to Afghanistan. He could shoot himself around the world through a needle but he couldn't seem to find port in the Thames in the summertime. He missed England, he missed Earth.

-Fucking BITCH AS NIGGA, YOU WANA GO BITCH?

He did not miss Azeroth

-YOU WANNA FUCKING GO?

He split the last of the heroin into two doses and took one up his nose from the flat of his thumb, sinking deeper into the busted out seat of the sofa. His fingers tapped nimbly at the keyboard, if he had the manual dexterity to play the violin he could certainly handle the clumsy mechanics of online gaming.

-is the server lagging you guys?

That was NanCee, a housewife from Minnesota.

_Just wait it out they'll say it eventually_

-it might just be your connection

-is the server lagging?

-Hey retarded ass whorelock, why don't you let your fuckin ball sack drop before you try to DPS

That was Sherlock, "Whorelock" the Warlock.

He hated his life, and the London police force, and his brother, and his mummy and Oxford University, he hated the cruel dispensations of his chosen profession, he hated people, hated Azeroth and all her mewling denizens but most of all he hated heroin.

He hated it for making him careless enough with his money that he could no longer afford to turn down cases he deemed boring. He was a whore. A brain whore, with no choice over who was the recipient of his inborn talents. Anything for money, anything for a fix.

He hated heroin because it was better than everything else. Better than boredom and loneliness and that crushing sense of endless penumbral ennui that genius forces upon the shoulders of youth.

-This raid is fuckin' bullshit

He was too constipated to eat even if he could afford the food. He chugged mineral water and coffee to stave off exhaustion, and for more than twenty hours a day, he ran raids against the Horde, desperately attempting to get his fox of a Gnome warlock to level eighty.

He named her Aphrodite.

Born of sea foam and her father's lifeblood pouring from his mutilated testicles.

Goddess of love.

He sighed at the irony and sipped cold black coffee. His fingers trembled on the keyboard, thumbing a hand rolled cigarette, leaving it in his mouth as one skeletal hand made its way back towards the mouse.

He dodged a fireball, triple tapped the spacebar, and moved his avatar out of harm's way before he lit it. French inhaling and dragging thick blue white smoke into one nostril.

The raid was almost over, he'd take the last hit and sleep. Or rather, lie there in the empty silence with the hum of his computer still running through the night and calculations for next month's utility bill keeping him from succumbing to Morpheus' soft nocturnal kisses.

His last needle had been thrown out when, after being meticulously cleaned and filed it finally left him with a stinging abscess in his last good vein in the crease between his thigh and his stomach.

So he snorted it, like a rockstar. A fair way to use up his client's down payment.

-I'm gonna RAPE you, I'm Gonna FUCKIN' RAPE you AKRYLIK!- StriKKK9 was yelling so hard into his microphone that his voice had become distorted.

-I'M GONNA RAPE YOU LIKE A RAPED THAT LITTLE WHORE- This caught Sherlock's attention; he pressed a hotkey to open a recording program which her had been running in the background for the past three hours since the suspect had logged on. Sure that it was working properly Sherlock leaned in close to listen to him rage.

-I'M GONNA FUCK YOU, AND YOUR MOTHER, YOURE BANNED YOU FUCKIN CUMBAG, OH MY GOD YOU CAN'T EVEN LISTEN, DO YOU FUCKIN KNOW WHAT I DID TO HER?

Sherlock's lips twitched, _oh, rapists,_ his brain said sleepily, _always looking for an audience to their perversion._

The psychology of this sort of crime was not entirely lost on him. He knew that if he waited long enough that Thomas, StriKKK9, whatever he was called, would be compelled to confess. Hopefully it would hold up in court.

-I'M GONNA MAKE YOU BEG FOR IT JUST LIKE THAT LITTLE WHORE

_Really, that was the best he could come up with?_

-I'M GOING TO FUCK YOUR THROAT WHILE I CUT IT!

_Finally something useful! _

-Calm down strik, it's just a game! – _no, don't tell him that!_

-DON'T TELL ME TO FUCKIN CALM DOWN YOU LITTLE FAG! I'M A KILLER, I FUCKIN MURDERED THAT BITCH.

Sherlock smiled morbidly.

-MADE HER FUCKIN SCREAM WHILE I BROKE HER LITTLE FUCK HOLE

Sherlock was grinning, long fingers in his hair, one arm stuck out across the coffee table to control his mouse. The cursor did little circles around the **record** button on his computer screen.

_I think that's a confession_

He let the program run in silence, savoring every immortalized word as the crazed dwarf first threatened Akrylik's mother, then his virginity, and finally his status as an officer.

_Will this hold up in court as verbal assault?_

He pulled the cigarette from his mouth, leaving a white trail in the blue light.

After another five minutes StriKKK9 logged out in a rage. Sherlock could tell by the timbre of his voice that he was playing on one of his alternate characters.

But the detective had what he needed. He saved the file to an encrypted external hard drive, turned off the computer monitor and relaxed back into the uneven seat of the decrepit old couch, blinking out the window at the distant pink black sky. The police wouldn't want the file until the workday started. He sucked down the ember on his cigarette until it burned his fingers before stubbing it out in a filthy ashtray behind his keyboard.

He lay back on the couch, toeing off his shoes over the arm rest. He thought vaguely of the drugs on the coffee table but found he lacked the energy to move, he could save it for the morning.

A small corner of his brain had been delegated to the arithmetic of addiction. He could afford one night to binge, and then ration, everything must be dosed, measured, prepared, tied up in the melted corners of sandwich bags, and kept in a pill case like his grandmother's heart medication, like his life depended on the drugs.

He forced his eyes to close, forced his breathing to deepen through his nose. Sprawled on the couch in a loose assembly of bones. He would never admit that it was the loneliness that was killing him. There had been, in his youth, once, a passing desire for intimacy. He had never indulged. He only cared about things that were sensually obvious, bits of color and shadow and smell and heat and words and drugs and music but never touch. It would overwhelm him. He would become dependent. An addict.

For even after all this he would never admit that he had a problem. He was, after all the tall dark paragon of English stoicism. His upper lip was invariably stiff. He certainly had the self control necessary to utilize opiates responsibly.

Sherlock stared up at the sky and didn't know the names of the stars. They were beautiful in their dark crystalline effulgence, so many lights that they would never be counted and still mostly black.

The universe stretched out before his eyes and it was vast and cold and empty. He didn't fantasize, not ever, didn't see any appeal of indulging ones baser impulses. Why wake the dragon and expect it to only burn straw when there's a whole city waiting for a holocaust.

He wondered if he would be a good lover sexuality was not, after all a terribly complicated equation. His knowledge of anatomy certainly equipped him with all the data he would need to provide a partner with adequate stimulation. And he was not after all, a poor actor it would not be impossible for him to flirt, and cherish and cuddle. Hateful.

Confused, sick and struck by sudden emotional pain he rolled his legs onto the floor. With the enthusiasm brought by impulse he bowed his head towards the drugs. He tossed his hair back from where it had fallen into his face, rubbing at his sinuses.

The deathly silent apartment filled up with the sound of the fan on his computer, the low throb of his own pulse.

He lay back on the couch, alone with his lover. Brain bathed in hot bliss.

He didn't need friends, he had dope.


End file.
